Tim posted an absolutely delicious item onto ToryDiary yesterday, highlighting research into the average IQ scores of voters for nine different political parties. Greens and Liberals came out on top, with the BNP at the bottom.
Reading the article took me back. Brace yourself: I'm about to Come Out on Centre-Right. Here goes. When I was a teenager - for reasons not unconnected to my comments on the Nick Herbert Tory Diary piece on hate crimes - I voluntarily took a Mensa test. Worse, I joined. Worse still, I learned that my score didn't only qualify me for Mensa (for which you need to score more highly than 98% of the population) but also for the "Triple 9" society (for which you need to score more highly than 99.9% of the population). In for a penny ... I joined that too.
What good did all this do me? From "Triple 9" I received a photostat newsheet which rather hysterically urged me to use my "gifts" for the good of the nation, as though at 15 I was seriously considering alternatives, maybe staging a coup d'etat, for example - the sense of hidden menace from the newsheet was palpable.
I went to one meeting of Glasgow Mensa - in Pizza Hut (draw your own inference re: intellligence) - where I learned that the defining characteristic of Mensa members wasn't their right-skewed IQ scores, so much as a sense of grievance. Every setback in life - a failure to attend University, missing out on a job, the collapse of yet another doomed relationship (OK, that was my own contribution) - was put down to being too clever by half. The society motto ought to have been Should Have Been Me. I didn't go back.
So I read the piece in the Guardian with an eyebrow metaphorically cocked. Even supposing that the results were believeable (statistically, they're not - there would be no more than a handful of Green voters in the sample, one supposes, making the average estimate highly unstable (i.e. repeat the exercise and the ranking would change)), what practical usage can we make of them?
In Brighton, Dr David Bull's election chances must have soared - his large constituency of Greenish, Liberalish voters (hopefully including me by the date of the next election) will flock to his massively educated mind.
Many commenters to the ToryDiary thread asked cheekily "If Greens and Liberals are so clever, how come they never win?" Perhaps - like the dolphins in Hitch-hiker's Guide - not running the country is merely another sign of their intelligence. Love Story was only half-right: being a Liberal Democrat also means never having to say you're sorry.
